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Legislative Updates

In 2014 BOMA Columbus through it Legislative Committee worked with the City of Columbus on its goal of reduced energy consumption of 20 % by 2020. The following provides the actions of the committee participants.

Like many other major cities, the City of Columbus is working toward the goal of 20% energy usage reduction by the year 2020 within commercial buildings. In order to achieve this goal, the City of Columbus put together a task force made up of non-profit sustainability groups, government green team leaders, commercial property managers, building owners, and developers.

BOMA Columbus has played an integral role on this task force, working hand in hand with the City to hone the requirements of the program in a mutually beneficial manner.

The primary goals of BOMA Columbus were to keep the benchmarking program voluntary, rather than mandatory, to increase the minimum sf threshold up to 50,000 sf, and to protect the identities of building owners who do not wish for their energy usage information to be disclosed. We are proud to say that over the course of five weeks, BOMA Columbus was successful in negotiating all three of these items. Those who wish to publish their building address and energy usage may do so, and those who do not wish to disclose this information can still participate by entering their data into EnergyStar Portfolio Manager. The City of Columbus will be able to pull trend information on an aggregated report, without the disclosure of specific building addresses.

The Columbus Energy Challenge kickoff event was held April 22nd, 2014. The goal was to keep participation in the program voluntary. BOMA building managers who are not currently utilizing EnergyStar Portfolio Manager were asked to enter their buildings endergy usage information into EnergyStar beginning in April, 2014.

With the change in 2017 of the administration this program appears to now be on hold. We thank everyone that participated from the initial committee meetings to the building managers that voluntarily entered their data. We will monitor the program to let our members know if it should become active again.